Afghanistan’ (Hershberg, 1996–97: 137). Aleksei Kosygin,
Chairman of the Council of Ministers, bluntly asserted that ‘Amin
and Taraki alike are concealing from us the true state of affairs’
(138), and noted that ‘they have continued to execute people who
do not agree with them’ (139). Interestingly, he numbered Soviet
advisers in Afghanistan at this time at 550 (139), and these
appeared to be the sources of the information that was put before
the Politburo members. In a telephone conversation with Kosygin
on 17 or 18 March, Taraki adopted an almost hysterical tone:
‘Why can’t the Soviet Union send Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Turkmens
in civilian clothing? No one will recognize them’ (146). Kosygin,
an extremely shrewd man, was not so easily caught, and in a meet-
ing with Taraki in Moscow on 20 March set out a position which
the Soviet leadership was to pay a heavy price for abandoning
within nine months:
The deployment of our forces in the territory of Afghanistan
would immediately arouse the international community and
would invite sharply unfavourable multipronged consequence...
I would again like to underline that the question of deploying
our forces has been examined by us from every direction; we
carefully studied all aspects of this action and came to the con-
clusion that if our troops were introduced, the situation in your
country would not only not improve, but would worsen. One
cannot deny that our troops would have to fight not only with
foreign aggressors, but also with a certain number of your peo-
ple. And people do not forgive such things.
(Hershberg, 1996–97: 147)The Amin period
In September 1979, there occurred a series of events which funda-
mentally shifted the Soviet approach to Afghanistan, and displaced
Moscow’s careful approach with one grounded in considerations of
pride and emotion. In a messy sequence of strike and counterstrike,
Amin, who had manoeuvred his way into the office of Prime
Minister in March 1979, succeeded in removing Taraki, who was
The Road to War 31